meyemind.com, this is the professional and creative website of visual effects artist, digital compositor, david schnee.

July 27, 2013

Decade of VFX 2003-2013 Compositing REEL

Cut together a decade of my wok as a digital compositor on feature films, it's not every project I've worked on, and not nearly every shot, but showcases (all be it breifly) a good sample of it. ~enjoy!

June 22, 2012

Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 Official Trailer

A lot of red eyes around here....

We will be completing work that will become the final glimpses of our wolves in the Twilight Saga later this fall... This is the final chapter to the Stephanie Meyer series and the end is nigh. Status? so far so good cranking away on the large battle sequence, some of which you briefly see in the trailer above. ~enjoy

Phil Tippett's "MAD GOD" Only 30 Hours Remain...

June 9, 2012

One of these days, BAM!

Apologies for the great distance between updates, although I know not who I'm apologizing to... if no one else, it's for a future me going back to read all this crap before I'm dead. Or maybe it's just so my co-workers can laugh at me, either way I win.

Mirror Mirror has long since wrapped as a painful memory in my VFX career, I'm currently knee deep in Breaking Dawn part 2, the last film containing Tippett's Twilight wolves... this will be my 4th movie now... dear Stephanie Meyer, thank you writing these, and yet, thank you for not having written any more. Any plans on writing more Twilight lore? Please don't.

I saw Prometheus
last night... and I loved it, such a stunning movie on most all levels equating a magnificent movie going experience. Hi-Five Mr. Scott, Gieger, Michael Fassbender, and the VFX Houses involved.

One of these days I'll be going back in time and shoveling dirt loads of updates making up for lost time, it will all come at once, BAM!

While it wasn't quite able to reach the series high mark, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1's
outstanding $138.1 million opening indicated that the sexy teen
vampires are as popular as ever. What does appear to have lost some of
its appeal, however, is dancing penguins: Happy Feet Two
struggled to even open to half as much as its popular 2006 predecessor.
Overall box office was up around 14 percent to over $221 million, and
the weekend currently ranks as the sixth-highest on record.

November 17, 2011

Killer visuals: Tippett's God speed fx for Immortals

I was interviewed by Ian Failes of fxguide.com a couple weeks back, and the article went up today, check it out below:

A stand-out sequence in Tarsem Singh's Immortals takes place
near the climax of the film, when King Hyperion frees a group of
entombed Titans from their cell using the powerful and magical Epirus
Bow. But before the released Titans can escape, the Gods descend from
Mount Olympus and work to dispatch them. A bloody close-quarters fight
ensues, with Tippett Studio combining live action footage, motion
captured performances and CG Titans and effects to create the final
shots.

In particular, the battle is punctuated by something known as 'God
Speed' to emphasize the otherworldly powers of the Gods and Titans.
"When the Titans died," explains Tippett Studio visual effects
supervisor Matt Jacobs, "they wanted them to take on a slow motion
effect. So when you see them get chopped in two or a head chopped off or
smashed by Zeus' chain they wanted it to feel more photosonic - around
500 frames per second - so there was a speed ramp as the Titan dies and
then goes into slow motion."

We talk to key members of the Tippett team about how they realized
the animation, effects, lighting and compositing for the Gods versus
Titans fight.

Although the fight combined live action, motion capture, CG Titans
and effects, the compositing, according to compositing supervisor David
Schnee, remained within reason. "We had your typical re-times, plate
clean-up and times when we had to make some of the action a little
snappier to emphasize certain moves and strikes," he says.

Tiles were shot all around the set to enable room to move the camera
and re-compose certain scenes if needed. Tippett's Christopher Paizis
was the matchmove lead. The scenes were all comp'd in 2D in Nuke, and
elements later broken out to allow for the stereo conversion. An initial
effort to give the Titans and Gods a vibrating look in order to sell
their speed was undertaken, but the approach changed to the photosonic
feel. Additional comp fixes included adding some more transparency and
sub-surface feel to the blood where needed and matching some of the live
action Titans with their CG counterparts, occasionally fine-tuning
markings on helmets or skirt and sandal trims.

"Our
biggest challenge though," says Schnee, "was dealing the projections
that we needed to help pad all the wounds that would occur when the
Titans were severed and heads lobbed off. They built some nice wound
artwork on all the caps for that stuff but there wasn't enough time to
go in and do a lot of interesting dressing of paintwork that would have
blood splattered onto skin and dripping down the contours of their body
and on clothing. So we came up with a pretty cool projection set-up
gizmo in Nuke to handle that."

The projection technique began with a key pose of a Titan, fully
dressed and mocked up, with a camera target and locator to project onto.
"We could then easily place our splatter or drips onto him," says
Schnee. "That would get un-UV'd and applied to the animated GTOs for the
shot."

In one hero shot, a chain goes through the chest and impales a Titan.
"For that there was a little bit of dressing on the Titan for the
wound," notes Schnee. "But then he also ends up dropping and stepping
towards the chain towards camera. The CG blood that is blasted off from
the impact bursts out in front of him and then he steps into it. So the
artist on the shot animated certain timings of the projection to time
with the CG blood, which we had as a number of effects passes."

The final shot

Tippett's overall shot count on Immortals came to 96, made
up also of a CG hyena-like 'mongrel' that replaced a live action German
Shepherd for a couple of shots, and CG Titans added to the film's final
complicated 'Sistine Chapel' pull-out, which was shared with RedFX in
Montreal.

"That shot had been done originally for a teaser trailer," says Matt
Jacobs. "It was filmed in photosonic stereo for everything in the
foreground and then in the background the characters were on a
multi-planes and multi-directions - all these Gods and Titans fighting
at the same time. It was literally hundreds of takes on greenscreen that
went into the shot. Tarsem wanted to gore it up so we added CG Titans,
blood simulations and parts flying in slow motion, taking some cues from
the death effects we had done already. We also inherited a massive Nuke
script from RedFX and there was a lot of co-ordination with them to get
all the assets. Then we integrated our work into it, and passed it back
to them to do some finishing."

Immortals debuted to an estimated $32 million, which is less than half of 300's $70.9 million and also way off from Clash of the Titans's $61.2 million. While those are both very similar movies, it's a slightly unfair comparison given the marketing dominance exercised by their distributor Warner Bros. In its own right, Immortals was actually very impressive. It is distributor Relativity Media's best opening ever by a long shot (Limitless was the previous high with $18.9 million), and it's also the top opening for a movie not released by a big six studio since Lionsgate's The Expendables debuted to $34.8 million last August. Finally, it's the second-highest opening for an R-rated 3D movie ever behind Jackass 3-D's $50.4 million, with 3D showings accounting for a substantial 66 percent of the weekend gross. The movie's audience was 60 percent male, 75 percent under the age of 35, and 35 percent Hispanic. Immortals received a "B" CinemaScore, and a "B+" from the under-25 crowd.

"Immortals": Simply put, I've never seen anything like
the violence in "Immortals." It's easy to say that the slow-motion
style is just a "300" ripoff, but it's not. In that film, characters
moving slowly was a stylistic choice. In "Immortals," the
time-disorienting motion is inherent to the nature of Gods and Titans,
resulting in one of the single most breathtaking battle scenes I've ever
seen committed to film, ever. Again, I have never seen
anything like those final 20 minutes of "Immortals." It's some of the
most beautiful violence I've ever witnessed on the big screen. ('Immortals' Versus '300': Pound For Pound via mtv.com